Editor’s Note – Refuse

The imagination 

This is the fifteenth issue of Usawa Literary Review. Eight years have passed since we published our first issue with little more than conviction, borrowed time and an unreasonable faith in resistance and literature. Since then, Usawa has remained what it set out to be: independent, self-funded and accountable to its readers, contributors and feminism. The workshops have not made us sustainable, but they have helped keep the work alive. In an ecosystem where independent literary spaces disappear with alarming regularity, survival itself has become a political act.

But survival alone has never been our ambition. Our ambition has always been to imagine. That is why Refuse felt like the only possible theme for this issue, for women have been both refused and refuse, as have been so many communities. Vermin, waste, filth. Cockroaches. That is what we have been called, that is how we have been denied dignity.

The student protests at Jantar Mantar

History teaches us that before people are denied their rights, they are first denied their humanity. Language performs that violence long before the law does. This furious, hilarious, foul-mouthed young generation that has left us with the most delightful memes belongs to a much longer history of public imagination—a thread running through the campuses of JNU, through the women of Shaheen Bagh, through the farmers who camped for months at Delhi’s borders, through countless, nameless struggles.

Even when it is silenced, censored or erased, every act of dissent leaves a palimpsest. Those who come after do not begin from nothing; they write into those faint but indelible traces. Which these protestors did, in thousands, in lacs.

Extraordinary things unfolded quietly. People sent food, medicines, phone chargers for strangers. They created a safe space for women protestors. Daily-wage workers sacrificed income they could not afford to lose to stand beside students they had never met. Countless nameless people sustained police brutality in ways that will never be recorded in official histories.

Many of those who came in solidarity belonged to communities that have long carried the weight of state violence, discrimination and exclusion. Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, queer communities and countless others whose own struggles remain unfinished did not stand apart and say, now you know how we have suffered. They came. They stood shoulder to shoulder with those who were, for perhaps the first time, encountering the machinery of power so directly.  This is not merely an erasure of differences. This is radical love. And it is time for us, the majority of this country, to reciprocate that love.

What this generation has enabled is the rebirth of our nation. For once, India does not feel like an abstraction invoked in speeches or campaigns. This is India. Ambedkar’s India. 

We refuse to accept fear as citizenship. We refuse for equality.

Love,
Smita